Social media shift getting Congress results
When Congress’s Madhya Pradesh chief Kamal Nath sat with party president Rahul Gandhi and senior MP and chief of the Congress’s campaign committee in Madhya Pradesh, Jyotiraditya Scindia, for dinner at Indore’s famous Chappan Bazar, little did he realise that it was going live on Facebook.
The dinner video — to showcase the casual and relaxed side of Rahul Gandhi — was a larger part of the Congress’s new social media strategy to attract more eyeballs on the internet. It attracted 2.2 million views. Later, when Gandhi followed up his dinner with a visit to a ice-cream parlour, it got 765,000 views.
Data from Facebook-owned social media tool called Crowd Tangle shows how Gandhi’s Facebook page has been inching closer to the popularity of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s page, even though its number of page ‘likes’ is significantly lower. In the last week of October, Gandhi’s page got 697,771 interactions, just 11,000 short of Modi’s 709,127 interactions. Exactly one year ago, Modi’s page had over a million more interactions than Gandhi’s. To be sure, the Prime Minister hasn’t started campaigning aggressively for the coming assembly elections; his social media interactions and engagement usually rise when he is in campaign mode.
Even on Twitter, @rahulgandhi is attracting a lot of interactions. In November 2017, Gandhi’s monthly median retweet count surpassed that of Modi for the first time. It has consistently been higher since then. In 2018, on average, the monthly median retweet count from Gandhi’s account has been almost four times compared to Modi’s account, HT’s analysis of Twitter data shows. Retweets and ‘likes’ on Twitter and interactions on Facebook are not authoritative measures of popularity or engagement because these also sometimes include interactions orchestrated through fake profiles and automated bots.
BJP IT cell chief Amit Malviya chose not to comment.
These are promising signals for the Congress that is keen to recalibrate its social media plan in the backdrop of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s formidable presence on digital platforms. The Prime Minister is the second most popular political leader on the micro-blogging site Twitter after US president Donald Trump. On Facebook, he has a following of 43,293,259 people as on Thursday while Gandhi has 2,056,215 followers.
The new strategy entails that Gandhi’s presence will be stepped up across social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram and Whats App even as Twitter remains the favourite medium for politicians to reach out to their audience. “Each platform will be used for different types of communication. Twitter is being used for short, clear messages while Instagram will showcase the personal side of him more than ever...,” said one of Rahul Gandhi’s political aides who asked not to be identified.
According to Statista, Twitter has around 30.5 million users in India, Facebook 294 million, and Instagram, also owned by Facebook Inc, 71 million.
In addition, on Whats App, some recipients will get stylised messages, said a Congress leader who asked not to be identified. He points out that when Gandhi courted arrest outside the CBI headquarters last month, photos and videos of what was happening inside the bus were quickly spread across different platforms. “Earlier, all these online properties were run by the social media (team of the party). Now his office is in direct control of these platforms.”
Gandhi himself is very involved in his social media strategy, the aide added.